The Cambridge Spies: Treason and Transformed Ego Ideals

Psychoanalysts have paid little attention to the character disturbances of traitors because few, if any, ever have the chance to treat political traitors or spies, although they daily see character-disordered patients who lie and betray personal trusts. Principally, Greenacre (1971a)—and few others Alexander (1969), Meerloo (1945), Nagera (2002)—in her related work on imposters, fetishists, and artists, considered the thwarted id wishes, ego distortions, and superego defects of state traitors by reconstructing the vicissitudes of their childhood development, as described in memoirs and biographies. But treason does not just follow a troubled individual personality development; the traitor's psychic transformation has a social and political history as well as a psychodynamic source. Group processes and internal dynamics together produce treason. Understanding traitors' individual development and characteristic psychic structure and object relations, although necessary, are not enough to understand treachery because in their betrayals traitors try to escape from and change both their own and their nation's history.

Treachery is a betrayal of a cultural ego ideal, as well a personal ego ideal. Sometimes traitors are the clerks and stewards of the superego of their society, intellectuals who instead of protecting inherited cultural ideals, principles, standards, and practices betray them. They try to dis-identify with an early idealized object, first personal and then cultural, and now debased, and turn against it. The Treason Act of 1351, the basis of Anglo-Saxon law against high treason from the Middle Ages to the present time, recognizes the unconscious motive of this political act. High treason was considered an effort to bring about the death of the King,